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Kuros David Charney is an American playwright, screenwriter, actor, and film producer. His work often combines social or political themes with human relationship drama.

Early Life
Charney grew up in Los Altos, California. His father, a native New Yorker and grandson of Eastern-European Jewish immigrants, and his mother, an Iranian-born American citizen, are both physicians and met as interns at Metropolitan Hospital.

Charney attended Menlo School and the University of California, San Diego. He then earned a Master of Fine Arts from the USC School of Cinema-Television, where he studied screenwriting with Mardik Martin and Mann Rubin.

After finishing school, he interned briefly at New York magazine, where he became the original writer of the "Trailers" column, reporting on film and entertainment news.

Career
While at USC, Charney co-wrote the screenplay Used Books, which received a staged reading at DreamWorks Pictures and was later developed with LeVar Burton as producer. One of his professors encouraged him to also try writing stage plays because of his knack for dialogue.

Charney’s first play, Shame and Desire, premiered at the Stella Adler Theatre in Los Angeles and was praised by the LA Weekly for its “delicious script, chock-full of snappy one-liners and Byzantine plot threads that keep the audience guessing right up to the surprise ending.” David C. Nichols of the Los Angeles Times criticized the play's "sour" humor and complicated plot but conceded that the writing was technically adept and starkly representative of the New York publishing world, while predicting that the play would be adapted into a feature film.

Charney's other Los Angeles productions have included his plays Anger at the Elephant Theatre, The Moving Forward of Souls at the Coronet Theatre, and The Man from Brazoria County at the Alliance of Los Angeles Playwrights New Works Lab.

In 2006, Charney was named an Edward Albee Fellow. During a month-long residency at the Albee Foundation’s residence in Montauk, New York, he began writing The Silent Exile, a play about a family of Cuban-Jewish exiles in Miami who find themselves in crisis when their daughter decides to run for Congress. Charney describes the play as “part family drama, part political thriller,” and says it “explores our role as citizens and the American political process with which we all must reckon, tackling universal themes of love, ambition, and the struggle to maintain one’s ideals in an unforgiving world.” The play was selected as a finalist for the MetLife Nuestra Voces award and was presented in New York at Repertorio Español, Urban Stages, The WorkShop Theater, and Theatre Row.

In 2013, Charney was a playwright-in-residence at the William Inge Center for the Arts, where his play The Gods of Great Men was workshopped and staged with Roscoe Orman as the lead. The play was directed by Karen Lynn Carpenter (Love, Loss, and What I Wore).

The following year, Charney’s play The Humanist premiered at the Dayton Playhouse FutureFest. The play deals with the corporatization of higher education and the perceived decline of the humanities.

His other plays include The Obliterati, which won a Beverly Hills Theatre Guild award, and Ramadan, which was published in Another Chicago Magazine.

As an actor, Charney starred in a production of No Exit at the 13th Street Repertory Theatre and a production of Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo at the San Francisco Playhouse, for which he earned positive reviews. The San Francisco Chronicle called his performance “quietly forceful and ever more compelling,” and The Mercury News called it “a magnetic turn.”

In 2019, Charney’s feature film Another City, which he wrote and starred in, premiered at the Manhattan Film Festival. The film tells the story of two strangers, fleeing failed relationships on the West Coast, who meet on the streets of New York, where their outlook on life and love is tested.

In addition to working in film and theatre, Charney teaches creative writing and film studies at St. John's University, William Paterson University, and Gotham Writers Workshop.

Personal
Charney currently lives in New York City.

His older brother, Darius Charney, is a Senior Staff Attorney for the Center for Constitutional Rights and served as lead counsel on Floyd v. City of New York, a landmark federal class action lawsuit that found the New York City Police Department’s stop-and-frisk practices racially discriminatory and otherwise unconstitutional.

Honors

 * Edward Albee Fellowship, 2006
 * New Dramatists Finalist, 2010
 * Princess Grace Award, Runner-up, 2012, The Obliterati
 * Beverly Hills Theatre Guild Award, 2012, The Obliterati
 * MetLife Nuestras Voces Finalist, 2013, The Silent Exile
 * Playwright-in-Residence, William Inge Center for the Arts, 2013